Transitions January 14, 2014

This blog has been quiet for a while. The podcast has also been quiet. There have been reasons for this, most of which don’t need to be spelled out here. Some explanation, however, is relevant to readers, assuming you have not forgotten about us.

Back in 2012, Ginny and I got married. Our living situation was not ideal, our financial situation not great, but our relationships with a few people was such that we were given the opportunity to share space, as well as a blog, with some people that were integral to our lives. So we packed up and moved to Collingswood, NJ.

I was optimistic, at the time. We knew there were risks in melding lives in this way, and we all knew it could not work out. But like all relationships, you sometimes have to gamble for the sake of it working out. I’ve gambled in such ways in the past and not had it work out, but my view on life is perpetual self-improvement and not giving up, because I don’t want to resign myself to cynicism. I want to make things work, when possible, and I hate giving up because things get hard.

But that isn’t enough. Everyone in a relationship has to have the same interest in working through problems for a relationship to have a chance at working. And even if everyone does want it to work, sometimes there are too many differences for it to succeed. So, despite my initial optimism and our attempts to meld a new home, this gamble will not work out. At least for now.

Polyskeptic.com isn’t going anywhere, however. PolyskeptiCast has been hanging silently for a while and I hope it returns, but I am unsure about its future. For now, some transitions are upcoming.

To start, I will be wearing glasses from now on. I just got a new prescription, and two new pairs, that I will be receiving within a week. Ginny and I will be moving out of the PolySkeptic compound in coming months, and moving back to Philadelphia. I will admit, I am looking forward to being back in the city, but I hate giving up on all of this. It feels like resigning. It feels like running away. It feels like losing family. But it’s quite clear that moving forward as things are is impossible, and my feelings of resigning and giving up are not shared, so move on we must.

The details are not necessary to you all. I will say that most of my silence on the blog has been due to the fact that the subjects I wanted to write about being too close to home. I don’t mind writing about my own shortcomings and struggles for growth, but when the issues I have extend beyond my own issues, and are not about our culture in general, my moral compass gains my attention and I tend to remain quiet. In coming months, that may change, as I try and sort through and articulate what I can learn from all of this, but for now I am reticent because I’m too stuck in the middle of everything to be even remotely unbiased.

I will also say that Gina and I will be staying together, hopefully indefinitely. I love her very much, we both enjoy each other thoroughly, and we intend to work through the difficulties to come to maintain committed to each other. It will be difficult, in term of maintaining our relationship, to not share space in the way we have over the last year plus, but I realize that it is necessary. We have not seen her voice here recently on the blog, for her own reasons, but I hope to continue to read her hilarious and insightful posts here in the future and long down the road.

If Wes wishes to keep writing (and I hope he will), then he will. His perspective on the world is very different from mine, and I don’t wish this space to be an echo-chamber for my views on the world, and so I hope to see more of his posts start to appear in the future. Also, if Jessie, who has been invited to write but has not so far done so, desires to add her voice to the blog then I will look forward to read what she has to say. And perhaps as time moves on I will add new writers (as I have in the past, which didn’t work out). That is to be seen.

To sum up, our living arrangements and intimacy will change (as Wes might say, it’s not an ending, it’s a change in our relationship as a group), but I intend to keep moving forward with the blog, hopefully improved with some time. There are tensions here, and plenty of responsibility to be shared for those tensions, but I hope that in time those tensions will be resolved with new circumstances.

That’s the thing about family. Sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them, and sometimes you really cannot live with them. But even when you hate them and can’t live with them, you love them. I don’t know what the future will hold for us all, but I hope that it gets better, and in the long run this will look like a mere stain on an otherwise really comfortable sweater. Because the winters of life are cold and often dark, and the people around us keep us warm, even if they might be imperfect.